Monday 2 April 2012 07.42 EDT
First published on Monday 2 April 2012 07.42 EDT

Literary novelist Ann Patchett's fight to save independent bookshops, which has seen her open her own shop in Tennessee and champion the importance of bookselling on American television, has led to her nomination as one of Time magazine's most influential people in the world.

Patchett, whose 2001 novel Bel Canto won her the Pen/Faulkner prize and whose latest book, State of Wonder, was showered with praise by critics, is on a list of 200 names of the world's "most influential" selected by Time magazine. The list also includes Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the Queen and Aung San Suu Kyi. Readers are currently voting for their choices among the 200, with a final list of 100 to be selected by the magazine's editors and revealed on 17 April.

Patchett, said Time, "has demonstrated a singular ability to write smart literary novels that are also big bestsellers". Opening Parnassus Books, an independent bookshop in her hometown of Nashville last year, shows the author has "put her money where her mouth is [when] it comes to literature and books in general", said the magazine, "placing herself on the front lines of several ongoing battles for the fate of the printed word". Patchett recently appeared on The Colbert Report, where she spoke out for the importance of independent booksellers.

As well as names including Ashton Kutcher and Kate Middleton, Patchett is also competing on the Time list with her fellow writers George RR Martin, author of the bestselling fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and The Hunger Games' creator, Suzanne Collins. Martin, said Time, is "radically refashioning fantasy for our complex and jaded era, and the results are magnificent", while "as if selling more than 23m copies of her dystopian Hunger Games series weren't enough, now Collins is a movie mogul".

To see herself sitting alongside politicians such as Obama and Angela Merkel made Patchett laugh, the author told her local paper, the Tennessean. "The humour of it is not lost on me," she said. "If Beyoncé can get 30,000 votes, I'd like to have 30. I would like fellow Tennesseans to vote for me just so I'm not an embarrassment to the state. [But] I don't think I am going to take Rihanna down on this one."

Her nomination, though, shows "that people are taking independent bookstores seriously, and I have come to stand for something," she said – namely, that community is important, and so is "feeling like we are not all being eaten alive by a giant corporation".

"It means people are ready for this change," she says. "And that's beautiful."

So far, however, the public's votes are not treating the literary novelist kindly. Patchett is languishing in 178th place in the poll, while Martin sits at 16th, apparently more influential than Obama. Collins is in 38th spot, just behind Amazon's boss, Jeff Bezos.